Love is Magic
by PhantomKn1ght
Summary: Angel E. Pennyworth is a normal girl. Not really. She's been able to see ghosts since she was 8, grew up in a pretty dysfunctional household, and was emancipated by age 14. Now at 20, after having a falling out with her two best friends, she finds herself on the run from a spiritual cult. Can she escape her destiny? How will things fall in to place when she meets the outlaws?


Angel was arriving early to meet up with Constantine. The girl was excited, and nervous. Today was the day...The plan was that they'd hang out for a bit and then go see Zatanna together. What he didn't know was that she had spent all night making him custom chocolates, and she had even written a really long letter explaining her feelings. Now she was here, standing in front of his door. But she heard some kind of muffled sound coming from behind apartment door.

She reached for the spare key he kept under the placemat in a sewn on pocket, opening the door quietly. Her heart sped up, and she knew what might have been going on, but she didn't want to believe it. She closed the door quietly. Things moved in slow motion. She could hear the sound a bit clearer now. Moaning.

She opened the door wide, to find her best friend and her best friend and crush bumping uglies. Angel's face turned red and her fists balled up. She punched a nearby wall. "What the fucking hell?" The girl cried out. Tears were threatening to spill out. Zatanna shuffled her body, covering herself with bed sheets.

"W-what the hell? Angel..Why are you here?"

Angel narrowed her eyes at Zatanna and Constantine. "I was here to confess my feelings to the dipshit who was balls deep in you just a few minutes ago. But now that's not going to happen is it?" She stated, she could feel herself tense up...Her knuckles turning white from how hard she was gripping the letter and the chocolates she had made.

Constantine gulped, feeling like he was caught between a rock and a hard place. "Listen it's uh...It's not what it looks like. I mean. It is. Maybe you should smoke some dank, darling? It's not that big of a deal." He attempted to pack a bowl in front of her, causing Angel to only get angrier and for Zatanna to cover her face. Embarrassed.

"I mean. If you take a moment to really think about it...We all like each other...So...How about we all..You know?" He asked with a sheepish grin. Angel grabbed a nearby lamp and chucked it at the wall near his head, missing, on purpose, but pissed off enough to display it right before she stormed out...

Angel sighed as the teacher concluded his lecture. She had been flashing back on that one moment for months. It's been 4 months exactly since she last spoke to Zatanna and Constantine. She'd been lonely ever since. And there had been this weird ghost tailing her too. She sighed turning around to see if he was still there.

"Listen, you've got to listen to me...Something's about to go very wrong here. You should leave, Angel. I know you can hear me. I can tell because every time I speak you choose to-" She didn't bother listening to the ghost clad in bright red. He called himself Boston Brand. Instead she decided to talk to a few classmates about the notes on the board, rolling her eyes and glaring at him. It shut him up real quick for a moment.

"I'm just trying to help you kid...Just because you can hear me doesn't mean you're crazy…" He reasoned with her. Angel didn't want to hear it. She had been hearing ghosts since she was really young. About eight. At times she helped them find peace, but as she grew older she had to wonder if she was crazy. Schizo or something. She was the only one who could see and hear him and that bothered her. Odds were that she was in fact crazy, considering her past. Her mother and father were everything but stable.

Everyone else looked at the notes, wrote in their notebooks, or had their head resting down on the table. Angel chose to look out at the window. All of a sudden there was this bright blue light that seemed to engulf everything. It looked like it was flooding in through the windows. Which was strange. It was a warm yellow sunny morning just a few moments before…

She stood up, looking around, everyone else seemed frozen. She heard shots fire. She screamed and ran out of the room. Everyone just sat there, as bullets riddled their bodies.

Her heart was racing and in a panic she found herself in a closet for quite some time. Hiding. Her only comfort was the ghost she had been trying to ignore. "W-what is this? W-what's going on?" She asked, shaking and scared.

"I tried to warn you…" He sighed. "Look. There's some group looking for you. You're some kind of elite medium with great potential spellcasting powers. It's a rare breed. Not something you see often, even as someone who hangs with the JLD."

Angel growled. "I already know that...But no one's come after me for it before... I should've listened...It's just.." She whispered in a harsh tone. Not wanting to admit that she was wrong. She bit her bottom lip, not bothering to finish her last sentence. "So what now?"

Boston snorted. "Look, kid. If I were you, I'd be hot steppin out of here. Most likely whoever's after you, even if they don't get you they're gonna want to make sure you're either dead or in prison. Y'know...Out of the way."

Angel's eyes widened. "Look at me." Boston rose a brow, and complied.

"Do you think someone as gorgeous as me should go to prison?" She asked, flipping her hair out of her face. His face fell.

"Now's not the time to kiss your own ass!"  
"It's always the time. Always." She said with a smirk,busting out of the closet. Okay...Well at least she always came prepared.

It's time to get serious.

She could hear moaning and groaning. The bullets that hit the students previously...They weren't ordinary bullets...They transformed these kids in to Zombies...  
She ran over to her locker, unlocking the combination code and pulling out two tonfas. They were like nightsticks, except hers were special.

"You always keep that in your backpack, kid?" Boston asked.

Angel nodded. "I've been in situations like this before. Well not quite like this...Usually battling demons and what not." She acted like that was nothing. But that was her life in England as a fifteen year old. It had been four years since she stopped dealing with the metaphysical realm.

Boston looked mildly impressed. "But why those baton thingys?"  
She pulled twisted off part of the tonfa, revealing a wooden stake covered in divine salt and runes.  
"Because although it looks just like a police nightstick with handles, it's actually a banishing stake if I don't want to just maim someone….No metaphysical being caught in between realms can avoid being banished by it. They'll be sent to heaven or hell accordingly..." Angel explained.

"So this entire time you could have sent me away to heaven or hell? Why didn't you if I annoyed you so much? And why ignore me if you've battled spirits and ghosts before kid?"

Angel's expression fell into a serious one. "Because I don't want to be crazy. I feel like most of my life I've been playing make believe, and now I just want to go to college, find a normal life, maybe a hot charming man to spend my life with, but definitely not hunting til the end of my days. I never wanted to live a life chosen for me... I don't want to live the way my mother intended.."

She dashed out of the classroom, college students and staff members charged at her. They were like fast zombies. Rushing at her all at once. She pivoted backwards as they approached her, noticing she was up against a wall. She growled. Turning her back towards the zombies and running up the wall, flipping in the air, twisting the caps off both of her tonfas. She landed in the middle of the horde, being pummeled into the center of the horde. She grunted, being buried by zombies who clamored at her. Just by looking at them. They were all dead….

Her eyes were able to see things that most other people couldn't.

The strings that connect people to this world. The chains that bind them. The soul and the body...

"Kid! No!" Boston yelled out in panic. She emerged from the horde, stabbing her way through, causing the zombies to dissipate into multicolored dust. Her blue eyes were sharp and glaring daggers at anything in her way. They weren't alive. It would be best if they crossed over...

"You had me worried there, kid." He stated with a chuckle.

"I'm a cheerleader. You don't need to worry about me, pom poms or stakes...I'll kick ass." Angel stated making a run out of the school. She ran into the parking lot, hopping onto her bright blue vespa.

"So who's exactly causing all this, and how do you know about it?" Angel asked Boston as she slipped her helmet on and fastened it.

"Some kind of a spiritual cult. To give you the heads up, kid...You're going to be framed for something big. I would get some stuff from home, empty out your bank accounts, you're going to be America's Most Wanted for a while." Angel gritted her teeth. Life was never easy.

"Great. So whoever wants me is trying to fish me out and get me cornered…"

Just as she was rushing by on her vespa she noticed police cars rushing to the scene, towards the school in droves. She made it a point to cover her face as they drove on by, keeping her head down low and level with her arms at the handles.

She slowly drove on forward, cutting through an alleyway, snaking behind a dumpster. Tinkering with her smartphone.  
"What're ya doin kid?" Boston asked.

"I need to damage the GPS capabilities of my smartphone so I can't be tracked...I probably can't use any wifi. Everything from this point has to be VPN or encrypted.."

Boston just blinked, hovering around her. "...I don't know anything about that, kid."

Angel smiled at him and laughed a bit. "I can tell. You seem like an old soul." She could literally see that. For some reason, she had always been gifted with the eyes of a medium. Maybe it was a trait that her mother had passed down to her. Even though she avidly tried to be nothing like her. Just the thought of Hannah...It made her shudder. Allen was no better either. Cold, logical, and belligerent all at the same time. Now wasn't the time to circumvent back to past and realize that she was probably screwed from the start though.

Boston saw the distracted look on her face, raising a brow. "You alright kid?"  
"Fine. Just fine...Just trying to...Got it!" She managed to disable the GPS function on her phone, moving on to her Vespa's GPS. He watched in curiosity as she dismantled her bike without even touching it, pieces floating gently down to the ground, her hands clapping together and her bike reassembling like nothing happened.

"Never was good with my hands." She stated with a smirk. Boston was amazed.

"Not even some homomagis that I've seen are capable of magic without speech…"

Angel blinked. "...Yeah...An ex-friend used to commend me all the time." Her tone was bitter and icy, letting Boston know not to pry.

There was this coldness to the thought of her ex-friend Zatanna. She still cared about her. They looked after each other for a while and it was one of the few relationships she grew to cherish.  
Like sisters. Something in Angel's icy stare melted, and taking a deep breath she delved into her past without Boston even asking.

"...I don't know why but I feel like talking to you. That friend...She was warmth. Butterflies and sunshine. A good day when everything went wrong. And she ended up destroying me. A part of me feels like she didn't mean it. But there's this screeching in my head that tells me that she did and that she never cared about our friendship the way I did...Again. Not sure... why I'm telling you this.." Angel hopped back onto the Vespa, once again fastening her helmet.  
"Well it's been a wild day kid, you probably need an outlet." She sped up on her Vespa, racing to her apartment before it was seized by police. That was priority now.

"That it has…" Angel stated with a sigh, running her thin fingers through her jet black locks and wiping some sweat off her brow after she parked her Vespa in the alleyway behind her apartment. Climbing up the fire escape and crawling in through her own window. Thankfully she lived without parents or a room mate. So they wouldn't have to be caught up in her mess…

Breathing a sigh of relief, she hurriedly packed all of her most important things in a red gym bag. She took one last look at the apartment. Memories played back here. Drinks with Zatanna and Constantine. Lazy weekends spent here. That spring break when she tried her hand at gardening and then she realized she should just buy some flowers instead. They died anyway. She had no green thumb and forcing things to bloom with magic just felt cheap.

Even if she sometimes did that on the streets for a quick buck.

Yeah, that's how she met Constantine and Zatanna. She was a street performer. Often wearing a disguise of sorts. She didn't want students from Bludhaven College to recognize her. So she used magic to make herself look different, her normally raven hair would be blonde, and her normally jaded green eyes were a bright blue. The name she went by was Sabrina Salem...Fitting for a witch. Though she met Zatanna outside of one of her shows, and Constantine in London.

As she got closer to them and knew what they were about they'd hang. Battle evil demons, and magical creatures together, usually she was coerced in to helping. Sometimes clashing with Klarion and Enchantress along the way. But the trio of friends have disbanded, and well it was for the best in her opinion. She didn't consider herself a heroine, a brave witch, or a vigilante. That life wore on her... She wasn't noble like Zatanna, and she wasn't a troublemaker like Constantine.

Angel was just somewhere in between the righteousness of all virtues and the contradictory sinning sloth that still manages to do good here and there. She hurried up packing her bags. Growing a bit frantic because the TV was playing a story on her. Boston had managed to flick on the tv. Her green eyes shifted to the wooden television set as the news reporter went on.

"A sophomore at Bludhaven Community College has committed a brutal murder. At Least twenty students are dead, some are in critical condition and could die. I'm being told we have a picture of the assailant and some footage of her entering the school with a assault rifle. I'll pass it over to Jim for more details." Angel paled. She had never even touched a gun before.

"Assault rifle? What are they talking about?" She questioned Boston with a snort.

"I'm not sure kid. But magic can do crazy things." Boston stated with a frown.

They both watched in horror as footage of her entering the school with an assault rifle was shown. It looked completely real. Not fake at all. Yeah. Magic can do crazy things.

"Fuckin' ditto mate.." Almost adopting Constantine's accent out of just shock...Deadpan confusion... She frowned and let out a loud sigh. "All of Bludhaven's gonna want a piece of me. Including Bludhaven's finest." Boston shrugged and bit his ghostly lip.

"Well...You could disguise yourself. Magic is your thing after all." Boston suggested with a smile.

"...I can't do all that much. My magic is pretty basic. I can change my eye color, make myself look a certain way but I can't do anything too crazy. If you really look you'll be able to see a resemblance no matter what.. I have a plan. I'll figure this out."

Angel dug through a drawer, fitting more clothes into her gym duffel bag. She blinked as she reached the end of the drawer, discovering a wooden box. It was a big music box that her mother had given her when she was five. It was better left here….Well...Would it hurt to take it?

Just for old time's sake she opened it, a familiar tune playing. She could almost put the lyrics together in her head. It was something her mother sang to her before bed until things kind of took an unfortunate turn...Family wise.  
Not wanting to focus on that now, she was going to put her mother's old music box away, but instead dropping it, causing the old wooden box to snap off the hinges and revealing a dagger, a necklace adorned with a ruby, and a pink cloth.

"...What the?" She sensed a power coming from the dagger, once she gripped it, her eyes felt stronger...Her reflexes felt a bit faster. The slightest movements in the room felt like they were happening slowly. A fly whizzing past. She swore she could slice through it using the dagger. She dropped it, her eyes widening. Okay. No one should ever hold that, at least no one who's not her.

She found a holster for the dagger buried under the bright pink cloth. She stared at the pink cloth. Fancy black letters were stitched onto it, reading 'For when the time is right'. It was no doubt her mother's stitchwork. Angel stared at the ruby red necklace before slipping it on.  
"That's a magic locator...It'll start glowing once magical activity's detected around you. It could be useful for trying to find our framers."Boston explained softly. Angel nodded.

"That's pretty useful. Kind of like I'm playing a game of hot and cold with a handicap…. Anyhow...I should jet. This place is probably going to be blockaded by cop cars pretty soon."

She took all the stuff she could and snapped her fingers, all of her stuff condensed into a black fashionable purse instead of a pile of clothes and a handbag.

She jumped out of the window and leapt from the fire escape down to her vespa. Time to take out money from her bank account. She whizzed around the building, hearing sirens that weren't too far off. She sped up to the farthest ATM at the edge of town, sliding her card through. A look of horror took over her calm expression.

"Your Account Has Been Frozen Due To Criminal Activity. Police have been notified."

Angel couldn't help but shriek. All her savings. All of it.

Boston nearly covered his ears with his hands but he remembered it'd make no difference.

Wiped….No access.. She reached into her vest pocket, pulling out her wallet.

Okay...So this wasn't completely terrible. She had $366 dollars. That was more than she typically carried on her person.

"...This is probably enough to get me to Metropolis or a little farther." Angel remarked. Boston paused. "Why don't you just use magic to like...Teleport there?" Angel shook her head.

"No. I can never control where I end up...It's difficult to control. I don't tend to use it because I've ended up in some pretty wild places." She explained scratching her head with a sigh. "...To put it mildly. You really do not want to know what Aquaman and his wife does behind closed doors."

Boston winced. "...What fins go where."

"Where don't the fins go.." Angel answered in response. People stared at her like a mad woman, obviously because it wasn't logical that she was talking to a ghost. It looked like she was talking to herself... She had to remember she was in public. The odd stares she'd get from talking to Boston only drew attention to her even more...

She flipped the hood on her varsity letterman jacket, covering her face and spending time in various little facets of her good memories here. Bludhaven had been a bright moment in her life and she had to leave here...It was sad. The last place she wanted to visit before heading to Metropolis was Outer Limits.

A club where Zatanna, Constantine, and her would hang out at. Parking her vespa in a dark alley way, against Boston's wishes because he was trying to reason with her to leave...She headed into the crowded club, flashing neon lights, bright colored drinks, and pumping music filled her ears and she felt like she wanted to dance.

Get lost in the lights and never stop dancing...

The bright lights and happy music bringing back only happy memories.


End file.
